Overview

Ponsse Plc is a company that specializes in the sales, manufacturing, servicing, and technology of cut-to-length method forest machines, and is driven by genuine interest in its customers and their business. Ponsse develops and manufactures sustainable and innovative harvesting solutions based on customers’ needs.

The company was established by forest machine entrepreneur Einari Vidgrén in 1970, and it has been a leader in timber harvesting solutions based on the cut-to-length method ever since. With experience from over 11,000 cut-to-length forest machines, this family-owned company is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of forest machines. The sales and service network covers 40 countries and the share of exports is 77 percent of net sales. Ponsse is headquartered in Vieremä, Finland.

Ponsse’s endpoint malware management used to be managed by two different suppliers. To simplify the administration and maintenance of the environment, and to raise the security of its highly virtualized servers to a level that meets today’s demands, Ponsse compared solutions from three providers. Trend Micro™ solutions were convincing, especially the easy administration of virtual server security.

Challenges

Since Ponsse had two suppliers for malware security management, it was more difficult to manage their environment as a whole. The security situation in the entire environment couldn’t be viewed without manual compilation of data. Ponsse had an IT organization of about 10 people so it was important to free human resources from routines to do more advanced work.

Ponsse didn’t want security that had heavy agents that consumed the resource benefits originally gained through virtualization. About 90 percent of Ponsse’s servers are virtualized, so they needed their security to be as automated as possible.

“We compared three potential providers. We compared the offers internally and with the support of the software companies, but we didn’t do any time and resource consuming tests,” says Ponsse’s IT Director Arto Haaksluoto.

“Trend Micro’s way of protecting virtualized servers suited Ponsse’s needs best. Since there is no need to install an application to each server, administration of the environment is much simpler.”

Arto Haaksluoto,IT Director, Ponsse Oyj

Why Trend Micro

Even though Trend Micro™ products are now being used by Ponsse for the first time, they were not completely unknown to Ponsse before this.

“Over five years ago we had a security tendering, and Trend Micro stuck to mind particularly because of its vision of virtual server protection—even then it was highly advanced, but too pricey,” says Haaksluoto.

However, the solution left an impression, and this time the commercial terms were right, too.

“Trend Micro’s way of protecting virtualized servers suited Ponsse’s needs best. Since there is no need to install an application to each server, administration of the environment is much simpler.”

Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ also helps to keep costs in check.

As Ponsse has global operations, it is extremely important for the business that the IT systems are secured at all times, and this is becoming increasingly important. Malware prevention simply has to work. The relatively small IT crew has to be able to rely on the tools and partners chosen.

“As a large enterprise, Trend Micro has resources to respond to changes on the security front.”

“Trend Micro, as a large enterprise, has a lot of resources, so that was convincing.”

Arto Haaksluoto,IT Director, Ponsse Oyj

Solution and Results

Ponsse uses a wide range of Trend Micro™ solutions to protect their endpoints and their virtualized and physical servers.

The company has about 750 endpoints around the world. Microsoft® Windows™ workstations are protected by Trend Micro™ OfficeScan™, which stood out with its ransomware protection functionality. The few Mac® workstations have their own security solution. Protection and management of mobile phones is supported by Trend Micro™ Mobile Security Suite. In the background, servers are protected from malware by Deep Security™, optimized for virtualized data centers.

The endpoints of the entire environment, from end users to the hybrid data center, needed to be protected so that security updates wouldn’t cause any trouble or sleepless nights. To prevent exploitation of vulnerabilities at the workstations, Trend Micro™ Vulnerability Protection was adopted, as well as virtual patching for the servers, found in Deep Security.

Storage systems got extra protection from Trend Micro™ ServerProtect™ for Storage. Email traffic is monitored by Trend Micro™ ScanMail™ Suite for Microsoft® Exchange™, and Trend Micro™ Control Manager™ provides a comprehensive view over the whole environment; it provides visibility into information from different solutions at one glance, and helps delve deeper into security incidences on many levels.

Commissioning went extremely well.

“The end users have barely commented about the change to new security software, so it has been barely noticeable to them,” says Haaksluoto.

Ponsse’s partner in this, and many other projects, has been Santa Monica Networks. Their collaboration has continued for several years, in both roll-outs and ongoing services.

What's next

Ponsse and Trend Micro™ will continue to have meetings during this three-year agreement. Ponsse will continue to inform Trend Micro™ about its needs and challenges, and Trend Micro™ will present its solutions to new threats and the benefits of new versions to existing solutions. They will keep each other up-to-date and move forward as true partners.

“In information security, one thing is certain: there’s always more to do, and your work is never finished.”